Ryūjin

The handmaidens came down to the well with jewelled vessels to draw water and found the water shining. They looked up. A young man was sitting in the branches of the cassia tree that spread above the wellhead, and he was, they told their mistress afterwards, more illustrious even than their king. He asked for a drink. They gave him one, and instead of drinking it he loosened the jewel from around his neck, took it into his mouth, and spat it into the vessel, where it stuck fast to the rim and would not come off. Behind them, past the gate, stood a palace whose walls and roof were built like the overlapping scales of a fish. Inside it lived the god who owned the sea.

He is called Ryūjin now, the dragon god, and Ryū-ō, the dragon king. The chronicles that first tell the story call him nothing of the kind. In the *Kojiki* he is Watatsumi, Ōwatatsumi no kami, the Deity Great-Ocean-Possessor, a sea kami with a palace and a court and a daughter, and no scale or claw is ever mentioned. The dragon came to him later, out of the long of China and the nāga kings of Buddhist scripture, and it fitted so well that the older name went quiet. Worth saying plainly, because it changes what the myths are about: the god in the eighth-century texts is not a monster who happens to rule the water. He is the water, holding court.

What he looks like is a question the record answers sideways. No source in the chronicles describes his face. What they describe is his house, his rugs, his table, and the shape his daughter takes when she thinks nobody is watching, which is a wani eight fathoms long, crawling and writhing on the sand of a half-built hut. The *Kojiki* calls that a crocodile. The *Nihon Shoki* calls it a dragon, and one variant account in the same book agrees with the *Kojiki*. Both readings survive, and the argument over which the word meant has never quite closed. The art has no such scruples. In painting and carving Ryūjin is a serpentine dragon or an enormous snake, and often he holds a single round jewel, the one that stands in Japan for power and for rule.

The best of his stories starts with a lost fish-hook. Hoori had borrowed it from his elder brother Hoderi, caught nothing with it, and dropped it into the sea, and when he offered five hundred replacements forged from his own broken sword his brother refused every one of them and asked again for the original. Hoori sat down on the shore and cried. The Deity Salt-Possessor found him there, built him a small tight boat woven so close no water could get between the strips, pushed him off, and told him there would be a pleasant road, and at the end of it a palace built like fishes’ scales, and a cassia tree above a well beside the gate. Sit in the tree, he said. The sea god’s daughter will see you.

She did. Her name was Toyotama-hime, and her father came out himself to look, recognised his visitor as the grandchild of heaven, and brought him inside. Eight layers of sealskin rugs went down on the floor, and eight layers of silk on top of them, and the merchandise was laid out on tables that held a hundred. There was a banquet. There was a marriage. Three years went by and Hoori did not once complain, until one night he remembered what he had come for and let out a single long sigh, and his wife heard it through the wall.

Her father did not waste a day. He summoned every fish in the sea, great and small, and asked which of them had swallowed a hook, and the assembly reported that the red sea-bream had lately been complaining of something in its throat that stopped it eating. The hook was there. It was taken out and washed and handed back, and with it the sea god gave a curse to go with it, a formula to be spoken while passing the hook over with the back of the hand: *this fish-hook is a big hook, an eager hook, a poor hook, a silly hook*. Then some practical advice about rice paddies, high fields against low, and a promise that within three years the brother would be a poor man, because the water was his to rule. Last came the two jewels, one to make the tide flow and one to make it ebb, and a wani one fathom long to carry Hoori home in a day.

It worked exactly as designed. Hoderi grew poorer, came at his brother with a weapon, and found the water rising around him; when he begged, the water went back down. He surrendered, promised to serve as a guard day and night, and his descendants were still performing the postures of a drowning man at the imperial court generations later, as a kind of dance.

The other half of the story is harder. Toyotama-hime followed her husband to land, saying the child of a heavenly god should not be born in the sea, and built a birthing hut on the tideline thatched with cormorants’ feathers. The thatch was not finished when her labour began. She told Hoori that a woman giving birth away from home takes the shape of her own country, and asked him not to look. He looked. What he saw sent him running, and when she understood that he had seen it she left the newborn on the sand, closed the boundary between the sea and the world, and went back down. She never came up again. She did send her sister Tamayori-hime to nurse the child, and with her a poem about how red jewels shine even along the string they are strung on, but her husband, who was like white jewels, was lovelier still. The *Kojiki* carries the line straight on from that abandoned baby into the genealogy of Japan’s emperors.

Later folklore kept the palace and let the god recede a little into his own scenery. Ryūgū, the dragon palace, is where the fisherman goes in the tale of Urashima, recorded under the name Urashimako in the eighth century in the *Nihon Shoki*, in a fragment of the *Tango no Kuni Fudoki*, and in a long poem in the *Man’yōshū*; the familiar Urashima Tarō is a much later name for him. He is rewarded for kindness to a turtle, feasted below the water, sent home with a box he is told never to open, and finds his village full of strangers who have never heard of him. He opens the box. He turns old in the time it takes the mist to clear. The warrior Tawara Toda got a better deal: he killed a centipede so long its body wrapped a whole mountain, by tipping his last arrow with his own saliva, and the grateful dragon king sent up a temple bell, a bottomless sack of rice, a cauldron that cooked without fire, and a roll of brocade that never ran out.

Away from the stories he was a working god. His shrines stand thickest in rural Japan, in the villages where the fishing and the rains decide the year, and prayers for rain were made at rivers and ponds and the deep still pools where he was thought to lie. Snakes carried his messages, and were held to be dragons of a kind themselves, which is why a straw rope twisted into a serpent still turns up in rain rituals. He was said to keep useful medicine, especially the sort that lengthens a life, and to appear briefly in dreams and in the moment of waking. The deep water of Lake Biwa is often named as his address, an inland sea for a god of the outer one.

His power comes from ownership rather than force. The tide answers him because the water is his; the fish assemble because they are his subjects; the wani ferry his guests because he tells them to. Rain and thunder are the same jurisdiction seen from a field instead of a boat. Nobody in the old texts ever fights him. His limits are the ones written into that same ownership: his authority stops at the sea-boundary, and when the boundary is broken by a mortal who looks at what he was told not to look at, the god’s own daughter is the one who has to close it and stay on the far side. He gives the tide jewels away and does not take them back. He lends his kingdom out and it is always returned short, three years here, three hundred there, and the man who comes back up the beach is never the man who went down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ryūjin?

Ryūjin is the dragon king and sea god of Japanese mythology, the owner and ruler of the ocean. He lives in an undersea palace built like overlapping fish scales, commands the fish and the wani as his subjects, and controls the tides with two jewels. In Japan’s eighth-century chronicles he appears under the older name Watatsumi rather than Ryūjin.

What are Ryūjin’s tide jewels?

They are two jewels kept by the sea god, one that makes the tide flow and one that makes it ebb. In the *Kojiki* he gives both to Hoori as weapons against his brother Hoderi, telling him to raise the water when attacked and lower it when his brother begs for mercy. Hoori uses them exactly that way, and Hoderi surrenders and swears to serve him.

Is Ryūjin the same god as Watatsumi?

Yes. Watatsumi, or Ōwatatsumi no kami, “great deity of the sea,” is the name the *Kojiki* and the *Nihon Shoki* use for the sea god who hosts Hoori and gives him the tide jewels. Ryūjin, “dragon god,” is the later title he acquired as the Chinese dragon and the Buddhist dragon kings reshaped how Japan pictured its water deities. The stories are the same stories.

Where does Ryūjin live?

Ryūjin lives in Ryūgū, the dragon palace beneath the sea, whose walls and roof the *Kojiki* describes as built like the scales of a fish. It has a gate, a well with a cassia tree over it, banquet tables set for a hundred, and its own flow of time, so that three years there pass without a guest noticing. Some traditions also place him in deep inland water, and the depths of Lake Biwa are often named as his home.

Is Ryūjin good or evil?

Ryūjin is neither, and behaves like the sea itself. He is generous to visitors who arrive respectfully, giving Hoori a wife, a lost fish-hook and two tide jewels, and rewarding the warrior Tawara Toda with a bell, an endless sack of rice and a cauldron that cooks without fire. He is also the power that drowns, and time in his palace runs against the people who accept his hospitality.

Related Entries

Ryū, Wani, Mizuchi, Ninigi-no-Mikoto, Amaterasu, Susanoo, Oyamatsumi, Yamata no Orochi, Zennyo Ryūō, Umibōzu, Ningyo, Naga, Poseidon, Mazu